With expansion a prime focus for businesses worldwide, many are looking towards rapidly establishing new regions of growth, particularly in Asia, Pacifi c Rim countries.
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heather@intlabmate.com The latest business developments from across Europe & Middle East
by Heather Hobbs
This section of International Labmate will especially look at the success of both Asian and European companies with established premises or business partnerships, highlighting the opportunities that exist while realising potential for other companies to move into export markets.
UK/Taiwan Talks Smooth Way for Increased Trade
International Trade Minister Greg Hands said: “With its vibrant economy and thriving consumer base, Taiwan presents huge opportunities for British companies to strengthen our trade links. Exports to Taiwan grew 21% in the last 5 years, and there’s room for more growth as we satisfy Taiwan’s demand for quality British goods.
During the talks, an agreement was signed which will make it easier for UK and Taiwanese businesses in biotechnology and pharmaceutical fields to protect their intellectual property. This will support leading UK industries like pharmaceuticals, helping companies export products like cutting-edge genetic medicines to Taiwan knowing their rights will be protected.
The ministers also agreed to deepen links between the UK and Taiwan’s leading financial sectors, building on the UK’s £176 million of financial services exports to Taiwan last year. In particular, the UK will offer its expertise in financing renewable energy projects and fintech development in Taiwan.
International Trade Minister Greg Hands and Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Mei-Hua Wang
In recent discussions between UK and Taiwan, centred on setting up new sector dialogues on trade in agriculture and energy, Ministers also agreed terms that will make it easier for UK specialist medicines to be used in Taiwan.
UK - Taiwan bilateral trade grew to £5.35 billion last year and the talks were held on the same day (1 Dec) that Taiwan’s China Airlines’ new London to Taipei flight begins, re-establishing a direct route between the UK and Taiwan for the first time in 5 years.
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Mei-Hua Wang said: “The UK and Taiwan have a very strong trade and investment relationship and as the UK leaves the EU, Taiwan looks forward both to strengthening bilateral trade flows and to expanding mutual cooperation. We have confidence in the UK economy, the world’s fifth largest and we consider it one of the priority destinations for Taiwanese investment in Europe. We also hope more UK investors make use of Taiwan’s excellent investment environment in the Asia-Pacific region.”
44830pr@reply-direct.com Partnership Uses Crowdsource Data to Advance Cancer Research
Qt, Quantitative Imaging Systems and KDAB have joined forces to help tackle cancer research, reports the Business Finland news agency Finnfacts. The partnership includes a crowdsourcing project, ‘The Coloring Book of Life’.
The Qt company owned by the Qt Group headquartered in Espoo, Finland, develops and delivers the Qt development framework under commercial and open source licenses, enabling a single software code across all operating systems, platforms and screen types. Quantitative Imaging Systems (Qi) is a biotechnology company specialising in cancer research and treatment, and The KDAB Group (KDAB) is a global software consultancy for Qt, C++ and OpenGL.
Through the partnership, the trio has built imaging software to help researchers gain a thorough understanding of the progression of cancer on a cellular level, using Qt’s cross- platform development framework.
The team has also launched the nanoQuill project, a crowdsourced colouring book and mobile app for annotating
cancer research data. The idea for the book dates back to 2015, when a research group developed an outreach programme to provide the general public with a way to assist in cancer research by colouring in features of complex cell images. The researchers hoped to enable crowdsourced assistance to identify patterns in cells that take much longer for computer systems to identify.
“The research that Qi is conducting truly is ground-breaking, but the scope of it is too massive for just one organisation to manage,” said Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group. “With our user interface capabilities and KDAB’s unmatched technology expertise, Qi is able to advance its research without being impeded by technological restraints. Furthermore, with the nanoQuill coloring book project, Qi is able to leverage an entire global community to exponentially accelerate the world- changing contributions it’s making towards solving cancer.”
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Collaboration to Bring Custom Flow Assay Design and Supply
A partnership between Sygnis AG - under the ‘Innova’ Biosciences brand name has established a partnership with Abingdon Health Ltd, to provide its customers with full lateral fl ow assay development services, as well as establishing Innova as the preferred colloidal gold supplier to Abingdon.
The global market for lateral fl ow assays is growing at about 16% per annum and projected to be worth US$ 8.2 billion by 2022, driven by the high prevalence of infectious diseases worldwide and the rising demand for point-of-care
testing.The partnership opens up an exciting opportunity for both companies to reach this rapidly expanding market, predicted to reach USD39.96 billion by 2021. The collaboration will allow the Sygnis Group access to Abingdon ADXLR5 reader systems, extending its custom lateral fl ow assay (LFA) services to include bulk manufacture.
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Alastair Carrington, VP of Business Development & Marketing at Innova Biosciences, a Sygnis company, commented: “There has been a long standing relationship between Abingdon and Innova. I am very pleased we are now able to set up a commercial partnership that brings together two innovative, industry leading organisations, with a clear complementary synergy to provide a total solution to the lateral fl ow community.”
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Outsourcing Provides Optimal use of
Screening Library Pivot Park Screening Centre has outsourced management of its screening collection, containing over 300,000 compounds, to BioAscent Discovery which offers expertise in fi nding optimal use of compounds while preserving their quality.
BioAscent’s Newhouse facility offers a scalable and highly secure infrastructure for storage of compounds in solid and liquid formats and numerous tube and microplate types, from ambient to -20°C. Its reformatting capabilities have already transferred 233,000 aliquots of DMSO stock solutions from microplates into individual tubes, enabling PPSC to cherry pick ‘hit’ compounds following primary ultra-high throughput screening and to confi rm and validate their activity on the target. PPSC will also be able to undertake follow up assays faster than before.
Commenting on the agreement, Mirjam Mol-Arts MD, PPSC’s CEO said: “We want to focus on our core areas of expertise, accelerating drug discovery via ultra-high throughput screening and assay development using our leading-edge infrastructure and in-depth experience. By outsourcing the management of our collection to BioAscent we have been able to benefi t from their expertise and specialised equipment. This has helped us optimise the use of our extensive compound collection while preserving its integrity and quality, in turn enabling us to offer our customers an even more effective, fl exible and cost-effi cient service.”
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Business
Opportunities
Europe & Middle East
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